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Season 1
• Season 2 → Season 3 → Season 4 → ---- Season 1 of Damages premiered on July 24, 2007 on FX. Season overview The show begins at what appears to be the end. A young woman, Ellen Parsons, is found running through the streets half naked and covered in blood. Investigation by the police reveal that her fiancee, David, has been bludgeoned to death in their apartment, and Ellen is quickly arrested. The scene shifts to 6 months earlier when Ellen Parsons, a newly minted lawyer, is being courted for prestigious jobs. She turns down an offer to work with the defense attorney Hollis Nye in favor of working for notorious lawyer Patty Hewes. When Nye finds out about this he warns Ellen that working for Patty will change her. Ellen soon becomes engrossed in the major case which Patty's firm, Hewes and Associates, is pursuing. Hewes and Associates has been retained in a class action suit by the former employees of billionaire Arthur Frobisher. In a case reminiscent of Enron, Frobisher is accused of insider trading and lying to his employees about the health of his company even as he unloaded his stock. Early on in the series Patty shows that she is willing to go to extreme, even unethical and illegal, lengths to win her case. One such instance is when she has the pet dog of a witness killed in a manner which makes it look like Frobisher is responsible. This action only emboldens the witness to testify. As the season progresses Ellen becomes more and more involved in the case, and in the shady dealings which Patty engages in. Part of this is due to Ellen's personal connections to the case. Her fiancee's sister turns out to be an important witness in the case. For most of the season Ellen skirts to edge of what is unethical, but eventually comes to cross that line. As Ellen becomes more and more devoted to the case, her relationship with her fiancee becomes strained. The situation is not helped when Patty betrays his sister. Eventually Ellen and David tire of Patty and Ellen publicly leaves Hewes and Associates. However, she still has an interest in the case and soon becomes embroiled in it again. Throughout the first season, the series plays with time. The narrative switches back and forth between a traditional linear narrative of events happening in "the past" and a more temporally disjointed narrative of events happening in "the present." The main plot focus of these flashes was the murder of Ellen's fiancee David and the apparent attack on Ellen that same day when she was staying at Patty's apartment. The flashes served to increase speculation among viewers since the audience was privy to information about the future which the characters were not. Until the final episode speculation over the identity of the murderer switched between a whole host of characters including Ellen, Patty, Frobisher, and a stalker who David acquired. By the end of the first season the main narrative of the show had "caught up" with the flash forwards and most of the questions raised by them had been resolved. Ellen was acquitted of murder charges, the identities of David's murderer and Ellen's attacker were revealed (at least to the audience), and the Frobisher case was resolved. Episodes Season 1 Cast *Glenn Close -as- Patty Hewes *Rose Byrne -as- Ellen Parsons *Tate Donovan -as- Tom Shayes *Ted Danson -as- Arthur Frobisher *Željko Ivanek -as- Ray Fiske *Noah Bean -as- David Connor *Anastasia Griffith -as- Katie Connor Category:Season 1 Category:Seasons